The story in the housing market is well known. But now it’s happening in education. The bursting bubble which largely contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown is back — this time in the form of unpayable student loans.
Sheryl Nance-Nash at Forbes writes that “with student loan debt now topping U.S. credit card debt and few or no options available for distressed borrowers (including parents who co-signed and now face the loss of nest eggs, retirement homes and other assets), America faces the very real possibility of another major economic threat on par with the devastating home mortgage crisis, according to a new survey and report, Student Loan ‘Debt Bomb’:America’s Next Mortgage-Style Economic Crisis, by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA).”
Student borrowing crossed the $100 billion threshold for the first time in 2010 and total outstanding loans exceeded $1 trillion for the first time last year. … To put the heart-wrenching picture in perspective, Dave Ingham, a disabled Vietnam vet who co-signed for student loans for his son, shared his story at the press conference. “I have been personally and gravely affected by the student loan bankruptcy crisis and I know our family is one only of many thousands across America facing these issues.”
AdvertisementHe and his wife live in a condo outside Minneapolis. She barely receives $500 a month in social security. The couple’s 35 year-old son lives with them, otherwise he would be homeless. He defaulted on his student loans as he has been out of work since October of 2009. “He is on medication for depression and anxiety. He keeps looking for work, but when an employer does a credit check they see the default, so he doesn’t get the job. It’s a vicious cycle,” said Ingham, who is being sued by a collection agency representing Sallie Mae. “My wife and I stand to lose our assets, including our condo. I realize my son made a mistake by being taken in by predatory lenders, but that does not mean his life and ours should be allowed to be ruined by these people.”
The answer suggested by some is to walk away from the “predatory lenders” who lent the students money to pay colleges to earn their worthless degrees. To fix things, President Obama is considering announcing a plan, without any need for congressional approval, to allow “some 1.6 million students to cap their loan payments at 10 percent of their discretionary income starting in 2012.”
Somebody is going to pay for the losses arising from the write-down on the student loans. Besides the holders of the debt, that someone is likely to be the taxpayer. The principal beneficiaries are going to those who made poor choices in their educational borrowings and the guys who provided the education. They’ve got theirs. If the banks have to take a haircut — well, the government can help them out.
And the bigger the mistake they made, the more they get compensated. At least that’s the way it is working out in mortgages.
The bulk of the settlement money — an estimated $18 billion — will flow to the perennial home of social experimentation, California. Partly that’s because of the holdout tactics of California AG Kamala Harris, who undoubtedly drove a tough bargain with her fellow AGs. But it’s also because so much of the state’s real estate is underwater.
“California gets an extraordinary amount of it,” Miller acknowledged. “One of the amazing things was how much of a problem there is in California.”
See? It doesn’t matter if you did the correct thing. If somebody else screws up, you have to pay for it. Why? Because it is their right.
The word “rights,” which once started out as an enumerator of what government could not do, has now become it’s reverse: the collection of positive rights. These are now a laundry list of what government must provide. At taxpayer expense of course. Otherwise the government can just print the money to pay for it. Either way, it’s “free.”
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Here’s a problem: this new crisis will work in the favor of Obama and his ilk. Too many Americans have a distorted notion of “fairness,” and will make Greek/French-like demands for the government to find another stash to rescue them from their gullibility and poor judgement.
The obvious conclusion when new bubble bursts: that we can’t afford to rescue people and also keep creating government-funded “rights” will escape many people, perhaps even a majority.
All of the socialist positive rights are backed/payed for with someone elses money and as Dame Thacher said, at some point you run out of other peoples money. All of these people and the politicans who service them are looking for the tooth fairy.
I suppose when there are no more handouts there will be social violence. At that point I hope we have someone around to meet out tough love. My father certainly would have. A belting and no supper before the children go to bed. All of these socalists are like a bunch of spoiled children; all benefits and no responsabilities.
Don R @ 1 — it does not matter if many people fail to conclude that we can’t afford to rescue people; the fact will still remain that we can’t. Governments can do a Zimbabwe and print/borrow all the way to Weimar & back. The end result will be the same — economic chaos and Peak Government.
It is going to hurt, of course. But I for one am looking forward to losing some of that unsightly flab.
Must I say it?
If Bill Gates had only gone to college, maybe he coulda been a contender.
OTOH some guys go to college, even graduate school, even become law review editor, and still never get it.
I do feel a measure of sympathy for all the unemployed/underemployed college grads with enormous student loan debt. These people did not grow up in a world where their actions had consequences; they could not conceive of a situation where things did not work out in their favor.
As cliched as it sounds, “society” does bear some of the blame for the student loan crisis; bankruptcy laws were changed to make student loan debt nondischargeable, so the schools and governments started passing out loans like candy knowing there is little risk the student will ever escape the debt. Our schools and institutions painted a picture of world where decisions had no real adverse consequences.
With that being said, parents seem to have fallen down on the job, and maybe some of these people should have thought twice before they borrowed $100K for a humanities degree from a school no one has ever heard of.
W:”Perhaps the reason why the Republican Party can’t nominate a really good candidate is that the existing system is designed to select sell-outs and losers.” Yes.
“It doesn’t matter if you did the correct thing. If somebody else screws up, you have to pay for it. Why? Because it is their right.”
Based on the new constitution Obama appears to be crafting, many of us here now have both the right and responsibility to shut up, work hard, pay our own way, support gargantuan government AND fund a cart-load of freeloaders.
I think bubbles are probably inevitable and it is sheer bad luck to be caught at the point of its bursting. The collapse of a bubble is a sign things have gone too far in a certain direction.
It is not a crime to be unlucky, but it is stupidity to keep inflating the bubble long after it has signaled its collapse. The first rule of holes is to stop digging. The first step has to be keeping the bubble from getting bigger, and then one can talk about safety nets for the unlucky.
Unfortunately, the idea that a “college education is a right” directly leads to reinflating the bubble. Why is it a right to study “gender studies”? Why is it a right to borrow in order to do it and walk away even when it is now manifest that you can never get a job to pay it back? Unless the provision of such a lucrative job were itself an implied right, arising from the right to major in “gender studies” to start with.
I’ve just gotten back from a total of maybe 40 hours on a plane, coming and going to a funeral, with little sleep in between. But on the way back, unable to sleep in my economy seat, I had the chance to watch “Inception”. Apart from reaffirming the belief that the only women worth pining for are femme fatales, in my exhausted state I lost track of the precise boundary between waking and dreaming.
That struck me as a metaphor for this world of “rights”. There is ultimately a bedrock of wakefulness in which all bills are paid. Whether that is the earthly life that we regard as real, or whether in fact this life is itself a dream is little to the point. Somebody has to pay. There’s a hard floor to which we fall once the “kick” wakes us.
We can’t go through life dropping down into dream layers and awarding ourselves fantasy degrees and lives unless we are aware that someplace, somewhere, everything has to be squared.
There are days in which I think that the Left, which self-consciously repudiates God, is subconsciously the most dependent on Him. They don’t take care of themselves and act like vicious children, trusting to Something to bail them out in their hour of need, simply from a love and generosity that they revile, and are prepared to take it by force and cruelty if need be. It is the ultimate narcissism. But whatever befall, they have an enduring faith in the existence of a Stash.
It will be there. The Stash, I mean. And perhaps Hell — or an Inceptional Limbo — is the place where God says, “pay up, I’ve got My rights too.” Bet they never saw that coming.
That gal didn’t plan ahead even when she wrote her ‘plaint. (!)
“She believes it is a right. Otherwise only the rich will be able to go to college in this era of rising educational costs.”
Really? So our current president, Barack H. Obama was rich? (I mean before he got paid for community agitating, er, organizing)
You should have to earn a degree whether that means working opposite your school schedule (which my sister, the attorney did) or serving your country in the military(as my father and I have), or winning a scholarship for sports or educational achievement (I know many). Those whose parents can afford to pay for it from their wages earned are exactly who the prospective students aspire to become.
If anyone should take a haircut it should not be the taxpayer but the colleges that failed to prepare them for the real world.
What else can you expect from people who think that the world sprang forth fully-growed in 1968 or something? The politicians gave away the future to keep their sinecures but it was to millions like willing Mr. Minnesota and his 35 year old adolescent son. Why do these sob stories never have any mention of the tremendous personal effort these adolescents are making to actually learn a skill with some market value? There are none because these dorks never worked to earn anything.
The bill for 40 years of feeding at the public trough is coming due and nobody wants to get stuck with the check.
There has to be a separation and divorce from the blue states and cities, maybe society at large, by Americans wanting to live the values of God, Family, Work, Community with minimal interference from the bureaucrats and the busybodys.
Obama may have already kicked a sleeping dog with his direct assault on the Catholics. I get the sense that lots more people are starting to look around and see that big government bogeyman standing in the shadows just waiting for orders to come take from them what he wants.
I’m not sure what will start it, or even where it will start, but I can visualize Values People aggregating in communities, some new, of 200,000 to 300,000 where they can live their lives the way they want without the cranks constantly jamming things down their necks.
Political scientists are well aware of the phenomenon of a country that produces more educated people than can be usefully employed. Until now it only happened in places like India or Tunisia.
Pete Beantown, funny that, eh? If the kid has a college education he can do something, anything to earn a living- maybe not the job of his dreams but something. (The military hires college educated men and women all the time) Collection Departments are happy to get anything as long as you make an effort, they get nothing if you default. Want to take bets on whether he is paying anything at all on his loan? Nah, too easy to cry about it. I am disgusted by a large swath of my countrymen and women.
The 35 year-old tragedy is referenced, but not disclosed: fifteen-years beyond matriculation — was he a professional student?
I can understand that, in some fields, defaulting on student-debt is critical.
Particularly teaching…
May I suggest placer mining of gold?
Maybe Cripple Creek isn’t too far away; there’s always Alaska.
And if the North Dakota commute is tolerable: he could be make’n bacon in the Bakken. I understand that if you can fog a mirror — you’re a contender.
In the meantime, for the good of the family, he should take a job below his station.
John, substitute the word ‘educated’ with ‘degreed’ and you are much closer to the truth. You can’t be truly educated and still believe in Socialism.
I don’t know who it was who pointed out that a mortgage and a college degree are not the key to the middle class — it is the financial and educational self discipline that make you middle class. The mortgage and college degree are the rewards of that financial and educational self discipline.
Years ago, you needed a 10-15% or more down payment to buy a house. That made it hard. Especially for a young person. It’s friday night and you want to go out on the town, and you have nearly $10,000 in your savings account. You could easily take out $100 and paint the town red, but you don’t, because that’s being saved towards the down payment. A few months or even years of that, and you have proven to yourself — and your banker — that you are ready to handle the responsibility of a mortgage. Want to go to college but don’t have a lot of money? You get a job and save your money. Take fewer classes. Take your first two years of classes at community college, get high grades, save up your money, and transfer into the expensive college of your dreams to get the upper-level courses that are the real value. If you can manage those two things — save for a mortgage and work through college — you’ve probably passed the middle-class entry test, and you’ll be doing that for the rest of your life. You’ll be saving for a car, then a better house, then you’ll be saving money for your children’s educations and your retirement, and, barring unexpected disaster, you won’t be a financial mess or a burden on anyone.
You don’t learn that lesson when you don’t need to save for a down payment. Why not walk away from that underwater mortgage? You didn’t put anything into it? You’ve got no skin in the game. It’s just like paying rent, right? Why not just walk away?
Why carefully plan out your college education? Everyone is automatically qualified for a student loan, so why not have a four year party? Take the easiest and most fun classes you can find. There are plenty of them. Just follow your whims — women’s studies, poetry, whatever. You don’t have to pay a penny until you graduate. It’s all wonderful and free until you have that diploma, and then, well … then you’re the 99% standing there with a sign and a $100,000 balance on your student loans.
And good luck making the right decision, because you have to make it when you are a teenager and not very good at making decisions. Lavish student loans and zero-down-payment, low credit mortgages fall into the category of attractive nuisances. They harm society and they harm the person they are intended to help. They take people who could become productive members of the middle class, deny them the life experience and self discipline that could get them there, and leave them financially helpless and ripe for exploitation for their entire adult lives. As if freedom from self-discipline were some sort of virtue worth subsidizing.
a masters in what? Most sucessful people have had jobs by her age. Paper route, lawn service, baby sitting. Those are entry jobs. I had better jobs than those while I went to college. I bet that the university level basket weaving programs are going to have a hard time filling the seats. There should be no jobs, no jobs for liberal arts teachers that is. Wanna have fun in gender studies? Do it on your time off.
john lynch…
I think you mean CERTIFIED as educated.
Really educated people get the ball rolling even before graduating: Jobs, Gates, Dell,… Vanderbilt, Carnegie, … et. al.
My response to Ms. Singletary – make all the loans you want. Get the kid to sign, and then get an authorized signature from whoever adminsters the endowment fund right alongside.
I guess I could describe once more that ABC show from 1993 in which a newly graduated Art History Major, French Major, and International Studies Major were unable to find the kinds of jobs they liked, instead working as a waitress, nanny, and door-to-door salesman. And then the Secty of Labor, Robert Reich, asked if by ABC if perhaps the students should have taken something that made them more employable, replied it did not matter what you took in college because the company you went to work for would teach you what you needed to know. It appears that advice was widely embraced – and it may even be true if you plan to be the Secretary of Labor in a Democratic administration.
But given Reich’s answer, why go to college at all? I had occasion to think that engineering school was as much of a initiation test into the profession as it was useful instruction, but at least it prepared you for something to a degree. It was not always obvious what it prepared you for, but I often found myself talking to non-engineers, even people with a technical background, and being astonished what they believed, or their inability to do a simple calculation that I scarcely had to think about.
So I think that what you learn in college is a much about attitude as it is anything else. And the attitude of many students, amd especially the OWS types, shows that even if Reich was correct, they are unteachable and thus unemployable in terms of useful skills.
jms…
The VAST bulk of the Greatest Generation became homeowners via the VA Loan.
It’s a no-money-down loan program.
THAT’S where the whole no-money-down scheme got its roots.
The moral hazard — for the pols — was in conflating GI veterans — with honorable discharges — with just any ordinary Joe.
—–
Which leads us all to the Carleton-Sheets’ng of America… Who could forget him?
Yet, somehow, the entire American real estate bubble — frothed up by no-money-down finance — flows into history without remark upon its foremost advocate.
Strange, no?
Today, the downside to Sheets’ism is manifest.
Such prolog is going to metastasize across vellum; for just how many wyman’s polemists does this society need?
——-
And, it must be said, this tribulation must be visited upon the unborn: for many are the co-ed who’s delaying marriage and chasing Alpha — never to settle for Beta — until it’s only Omega on offer.
Is it any wonder the TFR is collapsing?
Decades ago, relatively few people went to college, in the conventional sense. You graduated high school, you went to work. The company might give you some IQ and aptitude tests to see where you could best be used. If the company thought you were a smart problem solver, they made you a manager. You studied evenings, maybe took some classes in things that might help your career. You read books from the library.
Then Congress passed the various “civil rights” bills, and in 1971 the Supreme Court decided, in Griggs v. Duke Power Co, that any employment test that had “disparate impact” on minority hiring or promotion was illegal. To protect themselves, companies decided that a college degree was a prerequisite for any job that required the ability to read and write, as a way to get around testing.
Allow companies to administer aptitude tests, and they’ll go back to hiring smart people out of high school.
blert, good suggestion for the lad, North Dakota just surpassed Ecuador, if it were a country, as the 23rd or 24th top oil producer on the planet with 530,000 barrels per day. And it’s not too far from Minnesota, just a boring eight hour drive. I know, I’ve made that drive. Only trouble is he better take warm mittens and socks and be prepared to sleep in his vehicle a few nights — campers just got evicted from the overcrowded Williston Wal-Mart parking lot and motels/hotels are all booked for three years out.
Yes I suspect not merely Obama but the forces behind him (see Angelo Codevilla’s ‘The Chosen One’ for a brief on that! All the ‘birther’ stuff is just a sideshow to Obama’s real secret, that grandma and grandpa were spooks, who dialed him into the network that ensured his rise as surely as Putin was a product of the KGB) have gone too far. They are like Hitler after declaring war on the U.S. and getting beaten back from Moscow in late December 41′. The ‘Left’ or in reality the Global Corporatist Centralizers haven’t had their Stalingrad moment yet but it’s coming. The American people set all time records for buying guns last year. Their comeuppance is surely drawing nigh.
In other news, Viktor is still banned from any Ron Paul or Roger Simon related threads at PJM:
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/02/09/its-paul-family-lite-in-cpac-speech/
Mandatory education must end at 8th grade.
High school should be free, contingent on passing an entrance exam, good behavior, and satisfactory progress (GPA >2.5).
College should not enroll more than 10% of the >18 population. Entrance should be contingent on demonstrating an IQ of >110, SAT of 1100 or better, and retention should be contingent on satisfactory progress and agreement to serve in the military for 3 years on graduation, if called. With those caveats, I’m fine with the government paying for it.
Wretchard wrote:
“What Singletary probably wants as a “right” is guaranteed access to a car, house and all the goodies which were once correlated with attending tertiary education.”
The thing is, Wretchard, you could lop all the words after “goodies” in that sentence and you’d be just as correct and ultimately closer to what Singletary and company really want, deep down inside.
Credentialling masquerading as an education is just one version of the window dressing and “justifications” for wealth transfer. But in the end, it’s all about outcome egalitarianism uber alles, by whatever means or philosophical contortions are required.
In five years, Singletary et al could very well be giving another reason to steal my money and slide it towards someone else (skimming a bit off for themselves first, of course) and for them it will be a seamless gear change. “College as a right” is simply the reason du jour.
wretchard @ 8 said:
“Unfortunately, the idea that a “college education is a right” directly leads to reinflating the bubble. Why is it a right to study “gender studies”? Why is it a right to borrow in order to do it and walk away even when it is now manifest that you can never get a job to pay it back?”
My niece began her education at the University of California at Davis telling my brother that she was going to major in forensic science. Unfortunately, she found out that her chemistry courses were “too hard” and opted instead to major in “Feminist Studies”. She eventually got a B.A. in “Feminist Studies”.
If two people came to me for a job opening, were equal in all respects except one had only a high school diploma and the other a B.A. in “Feminist Studies”, I would give the job to the person with only a high school diploma. I would see the person with the B.A. in “Feminist Studies” as being “not serious” and disrespectful of the resources that went towards her education. The person with only a high school diploma probably did not have the opportunity to go to university and would be more likely to strive to demonstrate their ability. The key point here is my niece’s university degree actually made her less marketable in the work place.
In my opinion it is unethical for the University of California at Davis to be offering junk degrees like “Feminist Studies”. It is a misallocation of limited resources. If a student lacks the maturity or ability to pursue a valid degree then they should be designated as “academically disqualified” and expelled. The slot they take up at the university could then be made available for a competent student. Luring unqualified students towards junk degrees is another form of theft. The student’s time is stolen along with the parent’s money that was wasted on tuition.
Getting back to Wretchard’s point “college education is a right”. There is a concept so fundamental to politics that it holds the same status as the Second Law of Thermodynamics has to physics, i.e. “no taxation without representation”. If I am taxed by a political process then I have a “right” to some say in how that tax money is spent. This concept works in both directions. If I pay nothing into a political process then I have no “right” to be included in the decision making process. This fundamental truth goes further. There are so called fundamental rights that a political system normally guarantees mainly because those rights have no economic importance, e.g. Freedom of Religion. However if the political process is paying you something through some form of socialism then that political process has a basis for denying some of your fundamental political rights (you’ve exchanged your intangible right for something material). This is a very old concept and was the basis for the Roman emperor’s political power through the doctrine of “panem et circenses”.
A true democracy where everyone has equal political power is possible only when every citizen is restricted to paying into the system the same amount of wealth or resources. A plutocracy becomes possible when 1% of the population is paying 99% of the taxes. When a moonbat or socialist barks “tax only the wealthy” they are really saying “give all political power to the wealthy”.
Mr. Eggplant, concur 100% with your assessment of ‘junk degrees’. I would submit UC-Davis, on the other hand, in a moment of candor, would respond “Do you know what it costs to run a Chemistry Dept vs a Feminist Studies Dept? We charge the Fem Studies kids the same rate per hour as those chem kids. Jackpot, baby.”
Much like the proverbial welfare mother, or issuer of sub-primes, there is no negative feedback loop for their behavior.
And your example highlights another problem – all the entrance requirements in the world aren’t going to stop them from doing this once the kids are in the system.
Thus my Alinsky solution – if the universities want to stay decoupled from market signals(and they do), then figure out a way to couple them right back up. One of my alma maters has an endowment of well over a billion. Oh to be king for a day. “Chancellor, we’ve noticed the default rate on your Climate Change Studies and Feminist Studies grads is approaching 50%. From now on, your endowment co-signs the loans. Graduate as many of them as you please, and have a nice day.”
Within 2 years, there would be wholesale downsizing of the system.
As a follow on to 26: No taxation without representation should be the rationale for our kids to simply repudiate all public debt, once we hit the inflection point on the debt curve where we not only can’t pay the bills, we can’t even pretend to pay the bills by printing money. Nobody asked our kids if they want to pay for the defined benefit plans promised to public servants to be paid from future tax revenues. Nobody gave them a chance to vote “no”. So I am teaching my kids that they should feel free to cut my Social Security, federal pension, and Medicare when it comes due. In fact, I think that defined benefit plans for the public sector should be made unconstitutional for the good of the children.
Please–colleges were meant, in theory, to provide education to the gifted, the top X% of the population. The basic education that most everyone was assumed to be able to handle was provided in public high schools. The idea was that colleges were meant to provide knowledge that most people couldn’t grasp or assimilate.
But now we have a world in which everyone get prizes, and no one can be a loser. When you apply this to college it essentially turns a college degree into the equivalent of a high school diploma in the 1950′s, but it comes with a much higher price tag. The only way that everyone can have a college degree is to lower the standards down to a level where they are meaningless and my dog could go the entire route through medical school, although she probably would need my help in filling out the financial aid forms.
“Dave Ingham co-signed for his son’s student loans, and is being sued by a collection agency representing Sallie Mae. ‘My wife and I stand to lose our assets, including our condo. I realize my son made a mistake by being taken in by predatory lenders …’”
The words “predatory lending” are tossed around with no regard for reality. To understand a scam, you must know who pays the money and who gets the money.
The scheme is actually predatory selling. A used car dealer convinces an 18 year old that he can buy his first car with a loan and a down payment. The dealer overprices the car by $3,000 as part of offering financing, and the teen stupidly agrees.
If the teen makes the payments, great. If the teen defaults, the dealer reposseses the car and can still collect against the teen for the full purchase price.
The predatory part is to convince the teen to buy the car at an inflated price. The dealer makes a nice profit on the car above the price that the car can be sold in repossession. This approach works only if the teen can repay the debt. If the teen declares bankruptcy, the dealer loses. The teen has the incentive to repay the loan, which is bigger than the teen would like but it is not impossibly large.
Predatory Selling: Sell something for an inflated price financed by a loan, then enforce payment.
The student loan scam has the following structure. It is all legal. The “scam” is that trusted institutions betray the trust assigned to them.
(1) A school sells an education to the student with no guarantee of its value. If asked, the school reports that it offers degrees primarily to satisfy intellectual curiosity.
Motto: The student is an adult; ask him why he wants the degree.
Motivation: The school loves selling educations. Every additional student is mostly gravy for the school, and the students with loans will pay up for this opportunity. Schools charge higher prices, financed by this easy money.
Mistake: The student trusts that a college of fine intellectuals would not sell him something which is not worth the fees.
(2) Our government arranges to loan money to the student, in the name of equal opportunity. The easy money comes from Sallie Mae, the Student Loan Marketing Association. It makes guaranteed student loans directly to accredited schools. The government guarantees that Sallie Mae will recieve full repayment if the student cannot repay the loan. The government specifically excludes student loans from bankruptcy, so the loan cannot be dismissed or reduced by the student.
Motto: Every teen deserves a degree and a better life.
Motivation: Politicians take credit for doing good. Schools lobby and support politicians with campaign contributions and honorary degrees.
Mistake: The student trusts that the government would not lead him into misery. Wise politicians are looking out for him.
When Dave Ingham co-signed for his son’s student loans, he took on an absolute obligation which cannot be dismissed. That is why he and his son will lose everything as needed to repay the loans.
Follow the Money
The schools make most of the money selling more and higher priced educations than could be supported by the individual finances of its students. They bask in the glow of government support. “We must be worth it, or the government would not be giving us this support.”
Sallie Mae makes money. Most students can pay off their debt with a struggle. Sallie Mae gets partial recoveries by claiming the assets of the unfortunate students and co-signers. (Hey, they can go on welfare.) Loans that can’t be repaid are reimbursed by the government. Sallie Mae is a fine place for politically connected managers to make large salaries in nice surroundings, “doing good”.
Students and Taxpayers lose money. The students lose because they are tricked into buying an education which is valuable mostly because the certificate is required to get a job. Government support hinders the development of competing models which could deliver the parts of education which are valuable at less cost.
Many (or most) students buy an education which is worthless to them because it does not improve their knowledge, thought, or career prospects compared with what they spend. Many college students drop out with nothing but failure and debt.
The Great College-Degree Scam
== ==
[edited] This supports the notion that credential inflation arises from a perceived need by individuals to demonstrate potential employment competence through a piece of paper, a college diploma. Employers are using education as a screening and signaling device, at a low cost directly to them (the taxes they pay), but at a high cost to prospective employees and to society as a whole.
== ==
The Used Car scam depends on overpaying for the car. If the car is worth the price, then a few teens may use bad judgement, but they will not be encouraged by everyone involved to borrow the money to buy the car.
College is an expensive IQ test – Earnings
T Cobb@29: “The basic education that most everyone was assumed to be able to handle was provided in public high schools”
This is actually not true. In 1941, the white high school graduation rate was 25%. This is probably close to the “natural” fraction of the white population that can handle 4 years of English, 4 years of History, Math through trigonometry, 3 years of science and a foreign language (that is, after all, what a high school diploma is supposed to signify).
Let’s say that in 1941 there was another 10% of the white population which was capable of that, but denied because of personal circumstance. So, the MAXIMUM “real”, or natural, graduation rate is probably no more than 35%.
The “assumption” that the traditional HS diploma can be handled by “most everyone” is not supported by any data.
And college for everyone? You just have to laugh, or else you’ll cry.
I’m a thinkin that this ” college education as a right ” thing is just the tip of iceberg.
A few decades back something happened in our universities; they became cash cows for the elites.
The idea was promoted that a college degree was necessary to get ahead in life, and then credentials became all important in the corporate world and the ever growing bloated public sector . This whole play created a huge demand for elite credentials which created a huge demand for highly credentialed professors to build your elite university around. All of a sudden, the poor old college professor in who gives a damn studies, who couldn’t get a job in the private sector if his life depended on it, becomes filthy rich or at least reasonably well off . Costs soar.
Before you know it, the cost of college becomes a huge nut to crack for the middle class. Whereas in the past, where the State University was very affordable, it is now only affordable for the upper middle class or wealthy. Students or parents or both are forced to hock their futures to send little Johnny or Jill to college.
Now I tend to disagree with those who think just the rare intellectually gifted few should attend college. We live in a very competitive world and now is not the time to downgrade what amounts to our minor league farm team that creates and trains our future leaders. We need to do better, much better, not worse, in how we train our kids for the future.
The real question is how do we train and educate our kids for the future.
Our present system has become a scam. It not only is poorly equipping our kids for their future; it is financially enslaving the next generation to their college loans. But worst of all our educational system has intentionally indoctrinated several generations in very destructive ideologies that are slowly destroying America. That must stop.
Our educational system needs a top to bottom restructuring so it is again affordable, it open to all citizens , it effectively educates and train its students and perhaps most of all, it must again instill positive American values in our
children. Otherwise, tax dollars should not be used to educate our kids.
#31. gokart-mozart
That’s the problem with standards. People who can’t meet them flunk out or give up.
We pay a much higher price, individually and collectively, by lowering the standards needed to get a college degree or the abilities needed to get admission. Otherwise it soon devolves into the scene from the Wizard of Oz where the Scarecrow is given a bogus diploma in lieu of having a brain.
We have already done that to a large scale with High School Diplomas–many of the current graduates can’t even read.
Credentials only mean something when they actually mean something. More and more it seems they tend to have the value of used pieces of toilet paper. Its sad that not everyone is capable of earning a BS in Physics, but that’s life, and no amount of pretending is ever going to change that, unless of course we continue to lower our standards.
Prizes for everyone. Failure for none. And to Hell with Reality. What could go wrong with that?
So. I have a right, to be bribed by the government, and the government has the right to purchase the votes of potential voters in an election year.
This makes Leo’s point as well as anything can. That such ideas persist when both parties send the same people back to D.C term after term means they will persist with the same operating principle that government has been operating on, in this case since 1977, then “strengthened” again in 1989, once more in 1991.
If there continues to be talk of repeal, or *wretch!*, (worse yet) “reform” then we cannot even hope to turn back this tide, because the same “representatives” will be back there protecting their bailiwick.
Getting back to my example at comment 26 of my niece getting a B.A. in “Feminist Studies”. I believe most of us at Belmont Club including myself would agree that this is a completely worthless degree. What about a Masters degree in the classics where the student is expected to be fluent in Latin, Ancient Greek, able to critically read ancient literature in its original language and be knowledgeable about that literature? I believe this is a worthwhile degree even though it has almost no value in the job market. I recognize that this opinion is emotionally based. I can’t really think of a rational reason why a B.A. in “Feminist Studies” is worthless while an M.A. in Classics is worthwhile. The glib response that a degree in classics teaches one critical thinking doesn’t follow because a moonbat could apply the same sort of argument towards “Feminist Studies”. Maybe the basis for this opinion is knowing that it would be very difficult to get an M.A. in Classics while any idiot who could fog a mirror could get a B.A in “Feminist Studies”.
#35 Eggplant
I can’t really think of a rational reason why a B.A. in “Feminist Studies” is worthless while an M.A. in Classics is worthwhile.
Well, for starters, fluency in ancient (classical or New Testament) Greek or Latin enables someone with a master’s degree in classics to read some of the finest philosophy, drama, early Christian thought, military history (think Caesar, Tacitus, and Thucydides, not to mention Victor Davis Hanson), poetry, political history, and art criticism ever written. There are many fields that a person with an M.A. in classics might like to study further, from archaeology and history of medicine or science to linguistics and art history. And some people simply enjoy ancient languages for their own sake. I had a college classmate who majored in ancient Greek while completing premed requirements and going on to Harvard Med; she wanted to take as many classics courses as she could at the college level because she knew medical school would leave no time for Homer and Hesiod. I majored in history rather than classics strictly speaking, but I found that three years of Latin in high school and two of Greek in college were invaluable in studying medieval and early modern church history as well as ancient Greece and Rome at the graduate level. In addition to which I simply enjoyed reading Latin– maybe that’s not exactly a rational reason, but it’s not a bad one either. I would agree with you that the job market is not the sole measure of whether a given course of study is worthwhile.
22@MicaelC,
You are starting to veer in the right direction here with your line of reasoning.
Everyone is looking at this the wrong way. The current education paradigm is going away, period, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.
Here is a little look into the future: Universities, as opposed to screening people out as they do now, will in the future be begging people to come their campuses. There will be aggressive recruitment tactics employed at the level of high schools. Even further out into the future, high schools, middle schools and pre-schools will be desperately competing to attract the kind of people they think will provide value to their campuses. Ultimately, there will be online clearinghouses whereby people will be able to submit themselves or their children to an algorithm that will place them in a group learning environment tuned to their specifications. In fact, this group learning environment need not be static, but will be dynamic to fit the exact dynamic specifications for intellectual development chosen by student/parent/child.
What is valuable is not “degrees”, but facility. That facility can be built, even at present, in a way of the students choosing. Choices for individuals will increase necessarily as technological integration ensues. All the current “University”/”Degree Factory” can do is hope to forestall the inevitable.
One of the ways Universities currently funnel dollars their way is by employment of the “peer review” system of research credentialling. As integration ensues, “peerness” will grow in scope and good ideas will reign supreme as opposed to those who would deign to give their “stamp” of approval, which will in the future not be required. All that will be required is that the idea is good…
#35 Eggplant – “any idiot who could fog a mirror could get a B.A in “Feminist Studies”. Not true. Approximately 50% of the population would have no chance of getting this one, even if they wanted to.
Similar things are happening in the UK. Over here, we used to have a system whereby around 10% of school leavers went to university, and there was a variety of other higher educational institutions of lower status – agreed by everyone. Most of the latter were places where you got your education in your spare time from a job. And over here, the education of university students was paid for by government grants. It worked for us.
Now, undoubtedly in a cynical attempt to keep the unemployment numbers down, we send around 50% of our school leavers to university (which now includes all those other places), they have to pay for it and a degree (unless it comes from a really top-class institution) is worthless. And we have our Mickey Mouse degrees over here, too. I believe the favourite one is “media studies”.
37 @sfblue
Couldn’t agree more. The Credential Mill is a dead man walking. Other than some of the hard science and engineering tracks left, the only “useful” function that I can see coming out of that system is the networking (in the human sense) opportunities that it provides.
I have a lowly Associates degree from a 2-year college, where I learned from instructors who came back to teach (no tenure) after a successful stint in the actual industry in which I was training. My instruction was focused like a laser on my area of study, with the courses not directly related to my major being limited to the type of general skills that you need in the workplace, such as writing, public speaking, trig/analysis, basic statistics, etc.
My wife has a couple of BS degrees and went to a 4-year state university. We both were in school at roughly the same time, and I would often act as her study partner, even though we were on completely different tracks and had almost no classes in common. I got to get a good look at the curriculum that she was forced to take as a general requirement to get a Bachelors degree from this school. To put it un-delicately, the amount of worthless bullshit that she had to get through was unbelievable. A whole year’s worth of your typical “social justice” indoctrination (lecture and “lab” in the form of field trips to see the great unwashed masses in their downtrodden oppression), where no actual learning nor thinking was required or desired, just regurgitation of the proper Litany of Grievances. Even the other coursework which was more politically neutral was woefully dumbed-down in many cases. Of course, most of the professors are the ones who’s career tracks went something like this:
undergrad -> grad student/TA -> prof
Notice what’s missing?
Now that we have both been in the workforce for a little while after graduating, take a guess at who is actually using his education in his career and who took almost nothing from the Credential Mill into her real-world job? Thank God my wife is a smart and resourceful woman, and can learn on her own.
A lot of people would look down their noses at a degree such as mine, but there’s something to be said for folks who get “skilled laborer” degrees from a 2-year school such as automotive techs, nurses, network techs, welders, electronics techs, and drafters (forget those who go to community college to get a worthless “general studies” degree). I would venture a guess that the earnings potential of the previously mentioned individuals would collectively be a bit greater than the typical slack-jawed OWS retard with a BA in the racial grievance study of his choice, or perhaps Critical Marxist Pedagogy (oh wait, do that actually call it that in school?).
To get way back to sfblue’s point about “facility”, that is starting to take form. Take a look at the Maker movement and the whole phenomena of Skill Badges 2.0 (derived from the Boy Scout merit badges) that is popping up. Add to that things like the Khan Academy and the proliferation of Open Course Ware. If we can ever get our economy really jump-started, the dynamism of new entrepreneurial endeavors from younger kids who care about ability and don’t give a crap about college degrees, just might give the nudge needed to push the dead man walking into his grave.
This education bubble is merely another manifestation of all the money printing that has been going on, but Ron Paul has been telling us this for decades.
The government and their corporatist cronies have been manipulating or outright controlling almost every market in not only the country but also the world. When a CB prints money they do not know in advance where it is going to flow, and this is what is so insidious about inflation. So they manipulate markets in order to hide the inflation, and just as with pathological liars soon they too lose track of the truth. This is where we are now, and among those who have lost track of the truth is virtually every person with a higher degree from a US university.
All this dishonest money has not only morally bankrupted the entire country, but it has facilitated all these unnecessary wars that have sapped the country of wealth and vitality. And now the US is on the brink of the next war, surely to be massive disaster that will likely bring about its complete and rapid demise.
If Israel gets her war then it is unlikely that voters would even get a chance to vote for Ron Paul before the imposition of martial law. Certainly a trillion in unpaid college debts will all but be irrelevant.
PA Cat #36 and Eggplant #35:
Of unfortunate growing importance is the fact that a degree in the classics is unlikely to lead to demands that the Federal Government produce jobs for people with such “skills” but a degree in Femanist Studies does. This is not merely because peoples with degrees in the classics will likely be more regarded as being capable of critical thinking, logic, and self-discipline but employers but also because its very nature Femainst Studies focuses on how to get the government to focus on providing special programs and laws to help people based on their sex.
As Robert Conquest describes it in his book “The Dragons of Expectation” (p.54) the State is to some extent creating a nonproductive class and providing nonproductive work for them. A self licking ice cream cone.
Credentialling has other negative multiplier effects on society than the ones mentioned above.
Consider the person who gets a degree in Gender Studies and then gets a MA in Education (both of these usually matchbook-cover diplomas, except for a few very good schools in the case of very smart kids for the ed degree) who then goes into the public schools to teach for 30 years to get a guaranteed paycheck and guaranteed pension and healthcare and for little else.
This, after all, describes the bulk of public school teachers.
What damage is that person serving up to society, either being incompetent at delivering basic education to our kids, or worse, indoctrinating students to hate Christians and to think that people who have center/right politics are the same as Nazis? I guarantee this is happening right now in the public schools in your district, by people just like the one I described.
If she had stayed out of college and become a waitress or gone to a tech school and become a nurse not only would there be no damage and probably a lower cost, there would be no continuing damage.
Some time, in the right thread, I’d like to relate this scenario to my unified theory of how allowing government unions to exist, Roe v. Wade, and affirmative action have created every problem we have today, from the issue of education turning into credentialling, to growth in government, to illegal immigration.
“But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.” C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
I hadn’t read the Abolition of Man for a few years and this discussion on education prompted me to go back and take another look. What was interesting before is now obvious.
Lewis gave these lectures in 1944. Nietzche observed 150 years ago that we killed God. It took scarcely less than half that time to realize Lewis’ observation that we were killing our humanity too.
I hope the Catholic Church is up to the challenge that has been tossed down. It may well be the only institution remaining that will hold out humanity as something more than a Thinking Fornicator.
“One of the “we are the 99 percenters” recently held up a hand-lettered sign which complained that all her masters degree qualified her for was work as a housekeeper.”
Well, OF COURSE !! What else is a degree in Women’s Studies supposed to prepare her for??
She’s wrong on other counts as well.
She claims that if it is a privilege, it will be available to a shrinking pool of people.
Our history shows the opposite: In a growing free market economy, the goods and services once available to only the rich become available to a wider pool of people.
Virtually the only service that has declined in availability is live-in domestic service. This is now quite rare compared to a century ago. Anything else, from fresh food to education to travel, has become much more available.
And on a related point…
The picture reveals the chilling reality in the Left’s attitudes towards domestic servants.
Despite all they say, they are disgusted by them, and the thought of being “just another” housekeeper is beneath their exalted dignity.
No basic human right can REQUIRE the labor of others. For it to do so would mandate the existence and approval of SLAVERY.
University humanities programs should promote certificate, minor, and double major programs for students who want to pursue things like art history and the like.
Having something like that can give a graduate a positive edge among the future applicants for jobs and postgraduate education.
There are lots of Biology majors applying to dental school and having a minor or double major in History makes the applicant stand out in a positive way.
Advisors need to be honest with students who register for programs with zero job prospects.
I’m with Gokart. If high school were any good only folks more or less on the right-hand side of median (IQ=100) could (or should) graduate. Only the folks on the right-hand side of 1-sigma (broadly speaking IQ>110) should be graduating from college, and very roughly 2-sigma for advanced degrees.
By definition only about one-sixth of the population sits to the right of 1-sigma in the intellect department. Currently about 30 percent of the population graduates from college, but (surprise !) only 18% are working in jobs that actually require a college degree. That’s awfully close to the 1-sigma prediction.
By contrast, when I graduated from college (as a geologist) some forty years ago only 12% of the population graduated. I went on to a Master’s in geochemistry and eventually soil science and agronomy. Lots of alphabet soup, yet I’ve chosen to farm for my living, which leads me to a key point …
Rush Limbaugh has it exactly correct when he states that the largest single determinant of one’s lifetime earning power is career choice. My income as a farmer is modest, but I’m incredibly happy doing it because I chose it. I had the option to make much better money in mining, energy, or working for Monsanto, yet am profoundly happy with my choice.
Unfortunately, people who probably should not have attempted college in the first place end up with two-word degrees (Gender Studies, American Literature, Studio Art, and so on) which are utterly useless in the marketplace. Those folks have no choice, but they’re stuck not only with a university-induced entitlement mentality but with a monstrous debt that can never be repaid by the revenue possible from the career choices open to them.
Of course they wish to off-load the consequences because “It wasn’t my fault.”
Yes. It was your fault. Enthusiastically abetted by post-secondary institutions, who offered and encouraged a completely useless course of study. Consequently, we could solve this problem in a big hurry with two paragraphs of legislation — all post-secondary institutions should be held financially responsible for 50% of any student loan defaults beyond five years after graduation.
49. Bart Hall (Kansas, USA)
If ”sigma” means ”standard deviation”, one SD for IQ is 15 … or at least it used to be. Plus/minus I SD for IQ would be 85-115.
Notice that everything — everything — which falls under the control of the Lefties turns to dust. BBC was once the global gold standard for accurate reporting. The Church of England was once a bulwark of society. The US Democrat Party was once upon a time a prime supporter of the American working man. Universities — well, I could go on.
Seems like Lefties have a problem. Their King Midas in Reverse touch is going to be the end of them. The end of a lot of us too, unfortunately, but that may be a price worth paying.
Channeling Whiskey for a moment, notice that the majority of the students used & abused by Big School are female. A few years ago, the concern was that young males were now by-passing college. There would be “disparate impact” on the sexes if Big Government tried to step in to save Big School. Unsustainable!
Everyone who wants a college education should have one–provided the colleges eliminate all non-technical programs and degrees.
Lo, these many years ago when I was trying to get money together to enroll in a technical school (the first one in the family to even consider the possiblity of college), I went to my local bank to talk about a loan. This was a small bank in a small town. The First thing the loan officer asked was what I intended to study and how much I thought I needed. I told him, forestry, and I needed $5000 dollars. He said that, while forestry was a laudable career choice and he thought the cost reasonable, the bank could only go for $2500 of it because a forestry career really didn’t pay much and he had the bank’s depositors to think about first. I took the money, got through that phase of my education, and finally paid the last of the loan back while I was in the service.
Fast forward 25 years and I was hiring seasonal workers for the trail crew. A young man came into the office one afternoon asking for the job. When we shook hands I could tell that hard physical labor had not been been part of his recent work history. I looked at his application and noted that he had a Master’s Degree in Ancient English Literature. I asked why he wasn’t trying to find a job in that field and he said there weren’t any outside colleges and colleges weren’t hiring. He needed to make some money while he waited for an opening and thought a summer working in the forest would be “fun.” A little later in the conversation he mentioned that he had over $40,000 in loans on those degrees.
I didn’t hire him; didn’t think him a good fit for ten day swings with a pick and shovel.
I was struck then by the fact that apparently banks no longer had that old concern for the depositors
Permission to go OT requested, given our prior discussions of “Nuking Up”:
SAUDI ARABIA – IF IRAN GETS NUKES, RIYADH TO PURSUE ITS OWN (FEB 10/TL) TIMES OF LONDON — If Iran were to successfully test a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabian officials say the government in Riyadh would acquire its own warheads within weeks, reports the Times of London. Such nuclear warheads could be purchased off the shelf from abroad and the government would authorize the simultaneous development of a new ballistic missile platform and the modification of its planned civilian nuclear program to include a military aspect, Saudi sources said. Nevertheless, Riyadh stressed it has no current military nuclear program and will continue lobbying for disarmament in the Middle East. Pakistan would probably be the Saudi kingdom’s nuclear source, Western analysts said. There is speculation that Saudi Arabia helped fund Pakistan’s nuclear program in exchange for the promise that Islamabad would sell such technology to Riyadh if security in the Gulf worsened.
Our younger daughter is a junior with a dual major in Biochemistry/Philosophy at a highly rated state school in our state.The Biochemistry is the practical major, the Philosophy the one she loves. So far we have been able to avoid taking out more than $2000 in student loans. She has a small scholarship, works during the summers, and we pay as we go her tuition. We are fortunate that we are financially able to do this, many families can’t. We live frugally, drive ancient cars, don’t eat out, haven’t taken a vacation in years, etc. We wanted to enable her to graduate as close to debt free as we could manage. She knows that she will have to do grad school (in Biochemistry) on her own. She was offered over $20K/year in student and parent loans in her financial aid package from her college. Had we accepted it she would owe over $80K at graduation. She will have a more marketable degree than many but still that’s almost equal to a house mortgage. A lot of these kids signing up for these huge loans are young and not really aware of what they are getting into, but where are the parents in these decisions?
When buying anything and especially an education, caviat emptor. Would you buy a used college education from this man?
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LpPxOR85ncA/TnAXxNr31oI/AAAAAAAAB_Q/TsvqPXSxvl0/s1600/che-guevara1232976553.jpg.jpeg
sfb @ 37: Here is a little look into the future: Universities, as opposed to screening people out as they do now, will in the future be begging people to come their campuses.
For small colleges it has been that way for 10, 20, even 50 years. Many have compensated by recruiting foreign students, and/or lowering standards. I’m not sure what’s happening to the big California public universities under budget pressure, but there must be some pressure to reduce student populations.
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egg @ 35: Getting back to my example at comment 26 of my niece getting a B.A. in “Feminist Studies”. I believe most of us at Belmont Club including myself would agree that this is a completely worthless degree.
Well, y’know, I often find myself defending the very concepts of post-modernism in conservative-leaning political forums. I have a petit-academic friend, his own degree is in Chaucer, but I have watched him give rather interesting talks on post-modernist topics including post-modernist feminism (he might even have taught a course in it, I’m not certain), and I read some of his references, and would not count it all a waste of time. FWIW, his politics have tended towards knee-jerk liberalism or whatever TNR is publishing this month, but even he has been struggling recently. Maybe it’s just that a good lie has just a kernel of truth in it, enough to give pause to the opposition and leverage to the Alinskyite. Much of human knowledge is just the best we have, and gets updated or overturned or simply churned in a carosel of intellectual fads. And of course my *presumption*, too, would be that a degree in Feminist Studies would be worthless and the holder confused, stupid, bent, and useless. And yet, in theory, a student could do the entire major from a conservative point of view, simply to learn what was being said the better to subvert it, while preserving whatever tiny kernels of truth might be sifted out. Could happen.
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kc @ 55: Our younger daughter is a junior with a dual major in Biochemistry/Philosophy at a highly rated state school in our state.The Biochemistry is the practical major, the Philosophy the one she loves.
That is an exceedingly difficult double! Just wondering what kind of philosophy she likes, whether it is any philosophy of science that might related to the science of biology, or rather different ethical matters, etc. Although I graduated from college umpty years ago I’ve been hanging about the university for some graduate philosophy seminars in recent years, and it occurs to me, watching some very bright students struggling with the material, that it’s a very tough thing for a young person to wrestle with the morass of stuff in philosophy, where you are often asked to master stuff which is either obsolete, or both sides of a question in which one side is clearly wrong, etc, yet those value judgements are seldom given or allowed, at least in biology you are not expected to also learn and be tested on voodoo.
@Eggplant – Curious as to what kind of job, if any, your niece has right now?
One of my best friends growing up got a BA in philosophy at UC Santa Cruz, then more of the same for a Mphil at Oxford, then a JD at Stanford. When he was at UCSC I kept on asking him, why are you taking so many philosphy classes? Apparently he knew why.
My brother is just about through paying for his student loan. He is 58 years old and runs a chiropractic and industrial medicine clinic with 15 employees. He is now just pinched by federal, state, and local (Los Angeles) taxes and fees that come out of nowhere. With Obama Care pissing in the soup his income has dropped precipitously. He hasn’t taken home a paycheck for several months now and is in arears in his rent and child support. Yah, having a job is great. The obvious problem is that we just do not have enough government yet.
bh @ 99: If high school were any good only folks more or less on the right-hand side of median (IQ=100) could (or should) graduate. Only the folks on the right-hand side of 1-sigma (broadly speaking IQ>110) should be graduating from college, and very roughly 2-sigma for advanced degrees.
I don’t know that that entirely follows. IQ is a very fuzzy and limited measure. Are you also condemning those with high IQs to mandatory college?
I’ve seen plenty of cases of people who let perspiration take the place of inspiration or IQ, and contrariwise plenty of high IQ types who can’t be bothered to actually think anything through. I’d say let pretty much anyone try, subject to standard admissions processes, and let the grading system sort them out.
Also, sometimes even just a couple of courses, even if not all passed, are a worthwhile experience.
Part of this debate should focus on what “education” the lower tier of applicants (whether that be a matter of wealth or aptitude) actually get. Until recently I worked as a counselor for disabled people ostensibly seeking employment. Nothing could induce the people to question the value of education in and of itself. That within their reach begins with a community college. There may be good ones, but the one I’m familiar with would simply farm these people, harvesting state funding for finding them “disabled,” then enrolling them year after year in remedial classes which went nowhere. Sometimes these “students” had well over 100 units of credit; I recall one who kept going 14 years. He never made a dime, but his exploiters certainly did–all under color of doing Good, providing access to the Less Fortunate, etc etc. I hope God will forgive me for persisting in it as long as I did. I’m sure most of the electorate will fall for the argrument Mr. Obama and his minions will make; it would take a 48 hour day to give equal time to any other message.
In my family, my two sons, both with twelfth grade education, make more money than I do. They both work for Fortune 500 corporations in highly technical jobs. The older, who makes more, never had a lick of college. The younger is now earning his Master’s Degree in a pretty high quality program, private, paid for by his employer. (There is the proper link between work and school!) I, who have the most schooling of anybody in my family, made least (which, as I have described the work I did, is as it should be).
People in the education biz (some of them, at least) know these things. The proof of that is in the efforts they made in the agency I worked for, to conceal results. Their superiors could hardly avoid knowing this, right up into the federal agency level that supports this “access” through the states’ programs for the underprivileged.
I don’t know who it was who pointed out that a mortgage and a college degree are not the key to the middle class — it is the financial and educational self discipline that make you middle class. The mortgage and college degree are the rewards of that financial and educational self discipline.
CARGO CULT
It has been pointed out many times, including by our host here, that much of progressive policy and governance is like the S. Pacific cargo cults. Yes, these progressive clowns really do think that giving someone the trappings will transform them into those whom they are imitating. For instance, this is one of the purposes of Section 8 housing, to “civilize by osmosis” public housing denizens by having them infiltrate more prosperous neighborhoods where people are stable, disciplined, employed, and educated. It hasn’t worked yet, darn it, and neither have the dummy aircraft of New Guinea brought wealth to the natives there.
Today, public education is a pyramid scheme with teachers at the top. It became that way after it became a career instead of a calling.
Dennis – I suspect you might be a Norman MacClean fan. Great writer.
The average educational level attained by Americans in 1940 was 10th grade. Who believes we are a more capable people now? When Tocqueville described Americans as the best educated people on earth, few people exceeded 8 years of school. Their education was in work, periodicals, and the bible. He found ordinary Americans to be aware of things which the upper crust of Europe were not, and capable of more sophisticated judgements. When he asked one sailor why American ships were, unlike the European, built to last only twenty years, the sailor replied that in twenty years all ships of this type would be obsolete so it made no sense to invest in longevity.
Our educational system is seriously broken. It has become, as one astute commentator frequently points out, a self licking ice cream cone. As such, its main purpose is to increase its own presence.
Forty years ago, the production of the microprocessor led to one of the landmark transformations in history. The incorporation of the microprocessor in industry, science, medicine and education was driven primarily by those who had no specialized training in computer science. To be sure, there were computer scientists involved, but the vast majority of innovators came from other fields; electrical engineers, industrial engineers, TV repairmen, mathematicians, ham radio aficionados and other hobbyists from a large number of unrelated disciplines.
All of these folks had tools at their command; they could read and write, they had basic skills in mathematics and they knew how to use a library and had the financial wherewithal to subscribe to magazines such as Doctor Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, Byte and a other founding literature.
There were no educational opportunities for these folks. Sure, there were some courses that taught FORTRAN, LISP, etc., but the requirements necessary to take these classes would take years to complete. Instead, the innovators sought others with similar interests and established ‘computer clubs’ in cities nationwide. On Tuesday evenings across the country groups of 5, 10 or 15 folks would meet in a warehouse or similar locations and demonstrate their Altair, IMSAI or Digital Group computers that they had assembled and debugged by hand with very little test equipment.
The takeaway from this experience was not that higher education was unnecessary, but that it was a function of the individuals involved rather than of the educational system. All of these innovators had to learn the basic functioning of microprocessors, the machine language of their specific processors, then assembly language, then higher level languages such as basic, FORTRAN, LISP for which they had to key in, by hand, the code necessary to generate assemblers, compilers and/or interpreters.
Public elementary and high schools would be better served by teachers that are themselves high school graduates with a vocational specialty of education rather than woodshop or auto mechanics. Such teachers would spend more time teaching the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic rather than social justice and other doctrinaire pursuits.
Placing a greater emphasis on practical education, opening new career opportunities for high school graduates, student exposure to teachers with widely differing backgrounds, loosening the elitist grip on education and substantially reducing costs are just a few of the many advantages that could be had by reducing teacher qualifications.
Many years ago a sailor griped at me, “Mr. ‘_’ the Navy can take some Dance major and make him an officer and I’ll have to salute him.” My response included a spirited defense of the discipline needed to get that degree, and a warning that dancers are athletes who can kick his butt.
We should start by identifying the skills that getting a liberal arts degree should represent. These should closely match the skills that make someone management material. The skills that make you employable and fit to act as a citizen should be conferred by High School. Neither level is doing its job. All else is commentary.
I recall my Grandson who came in with a medal he was awarded at softball. I made a big deal about it and was going to hang it thinking it would be a fitting award, the Boy set me right by saying, “pawpaw that medal doesn’t mean anything, everyone gets them whether they win or lose” Like the trophy his team got even though they lost every game, it meant nothing and the boy, bless his l’il heart, caught on fast that it was worthless.
We are seeing trophy’s given for nothing accomplished and pay given where there is no work done nor job attended.
At least some of the kids have figured the liberal shit out.
jw @ 64: The average educational level attained by Americans in 1940 was 10th grade. Who believes we are a more capable people now.
is this a trick question?
our *capabilities* are immensely greater today.
I know what you mean, but part of that is a consequence – our capabilities are so great today, and what do we *do* with it? not much. we sent men to the moon with nothing but slide rules and ball peen hammers, and today – we don’t send anyone even into orbit. the Chinese may be the next to land someone on the moon, fifty years after we did, and perhaps because we did not sufficiently prove that it is not composed out of green tofu.
our capabilities, due to computers and automation and other advances in medicine and science, are just ridiculously greater now than seventy years ago. just look at that flat-screen tv in your living room, I mean omg. but if anything, the quality of our politicians is a fraction of what it was back then, even though any one of them can Google 10000x the information, reference books, or communications with constituents, right from their iPad, compared to what anyone could do in 1940.
it’s all the worse for that, ain’t it.
–
the problem, to some extent, is that these capabilities seem to run counter to the necessity that any individual actually knows wft is going on. what kids today can do math, without their calculators, iPads, etc? it’s not a completely new thought, Michael Moorcock’s “An Alien Heat” is an old scifi book about the decadent last men, who have almost unlimited power at their fingertips and no idea what to do with it. Or Forbidden Planet, which is whatever Shakespeare play(s) in outer space, what is it, The Tempest and/or Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Very, very sad to see such a narrow minded bunch of otherwise intelligent people, it reflects poorly on those who espouse the conservative position.
Taken to any logical conclusion you would have, say, a child who wanted to be a carpenter, taught only woodwork and building (huge enough subjects in themselves, but that is not the point,) once they had mastered enough reading, writing and math for their profession. Worse, you appear to endorse those awful ‘captains of industry’ who are always complaining that we are not turning our enough “Lower sager makers’ bottom fitters.”
I have had neither a job nor a profession for most of my adult life, does that mean I need not have learned aboput art, music or Latin? Maybe I should not have learned about airplanes, military drill, model and narrow gauge railways, rowing and sailing or even cricket (which I hated!) nor participated in drama (an enormous developmental opportunity.) None of these have been substantially useful in business or career but they have all enhanced the value of my life immeasurably.
All my five sons studied History at university, with Philosophy, Computer Sciences and other various things thrown in. Three of them are now pilots and one is a restaurant manager ( one is still at uni,) but I am satisfied the sacrifices we made to send them were well made and more than fair value. I quite agree that using their degrees as gate passes for their professions is absurd (and the Air Force here does that so they did need their degrees,) but the broadening of their interests so they can appreciate life outside the narrow confines of their professions and contribute to a broader society is important too.
I, too, have little sympathy with the degrees in victim hood, professors who demand students regurgitate their own views and faculties that inculcate students with their own political philosophy, but those are imperfections. To denigrate education for the imperfections of the system or the frailties of its teachers is just , well, uneducated.
JoeB @ 58 asked:
“@Eggplant – Curious as to what kind of job, if any, your niece has right now?”
My niece wanted to “double down” and get a masters degree in Feminist Studies. However at that point my brother belatedly invoked “tough love” and refused to fund it. Truth to tell, if it had been my daughter, I would have invoked tough love as soon as I heard she wanted to major in Feminist Studies and terminated her university education (this is a sensitive topic of conversation between my brother and myself). My niece could not find any scholarships to pursue her education so she left university with a B.A. degree in Feminist Studies. Of course there were no job opportunities for someone with this degree. She floundered around for a while (continuing to mooch money from my brother) until she got some income working as a voice actress for video games and industrial videos. She then married this fine young man with a degree in cinematography. Like my niece, he was also effectively unemployable. He currently makes his living delivering ice cream but also films the occasional movie as a hobby or for token payment. My niece now makes most of her income as a shop assistant. My niece’s husband’s family has a little bit of money. My brother has more or less cut his daughter off (he probably squandered close to $100k trying to get his daughter started). My niece and her husband mooched a down payment for a house from her husband’s family.
Earlier I said: “I can’t really think of a rational reason why a B.A. in “Feminist Studies” is worthless while an M.A. in Classics is worthwhile.”
PA Cat @ 36 responded:
“Well, for starters, fluency in ancient (classical or New Testament) Greek or Latin enables someone with a master’s degree in classics to read some of the finest philosophy, drama, early Christian thought, military history (think Caesar, Tacitus, and Thucydides, not to mention Victor Davis Hanson), poetry, political history, and art criticism ever written. There are many fields that a person with an M.A. in classics might like to study further, from archaeology and history of medicine or science to linguistics and art history. And some people simply enjoy ancient languages for their own sake.”
I entirely agree with PA Cat. Truth to tell, after I retire, it is my intention to attempt to learn ancient Greek. I know this will be a quixotic exercise because I’m terrible with languages and trying to learn ancient Greek will be like trying to drive nails into granite. However one of my heros is Thucydides and I also enjoy Polybius. I’d love to be able to read both historians in the original Greek. I have a doctors degree in aerospace engineering and love my profession. However if God appeared to me in a puff of blue smoke, restored my mind and body to that of a 23 year old, gave me $3 million dollars to live off of, and told me that I could pursue any career that I liked but it had to be nontechnical, then given those miracles, I’d pursue a Ph.D. in Classics from either Stanford University or Harvard (getting accepted into those programs would require another miracle).
ChrisVJ @ 69: “Very, very sad to see such a narrow minded bunch of otherwise intelligent people…”
Hey, pal! Who you calling “intelligent”?
Joking aside; perhaps you misunderstand, Chris. People aren’t knocking education — we are knocking the Political Correct, dysfunctional educational system.
It is wonderful that people want to study Ancient Greek; just not on someone else’s dime. It is not so wonderful that some people end up in Wymyns’ Studies — a mind is a terrible thing to waste, as someone once said.
The current educational system is just another symptom of overgrown government — unsustainable overgrown government. That should be obvious in the UK, where the education system is basically used to keep the unemployment numbers down. That can’t last, but we will always need real education.
AM at 62
I do like Norman McClean. The story in “A River Runs Through It” about the summer experience on the Ranger District was the same District on which I was the Ranger for a while. There was some use of literary license about places and events and a few uses of other’s experiences from the old days on the District in the book, and that turned me off on him for awhile, but about the third time I read him I really began to understand what he was saying. I have liked him since, and am glad I gave him a second and third chance. His “Young Men and Fire” is a classic if you haven’t read it yet. Wag Dodge, who was the leader on the Mann Gulch Fire, became the Assistant Fire Control Officer on that same District I was on after the burnover. He never really recovered from that experience and died at a relatively young age.
D.Barimen@39 This is why I decided against enrolling in Med School.
P.Boston@43 C.S.Lewis was a prescient man, it seems. I’ll have to review his work.
Josh@57 I have been in some small communication w/ powers that be among UC. If I can contact you privately, I’ll fill you in.
Is that all that is required?
It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Who can argue with the inherent value of education? So let’s just allocate money from the national treasury to provide opportunity for those with paltry resources. Everyone gets to go to college. Plus we get to feel good about ourselves. Yes, we are wonderful people, caring about those who have less. It feels pretty good to give away other people’s money. Doesn’t diminish our own stash of cash as much. Just like the “Tragedy of the Commons”.
Sure, some will engage in “deeper thinking”, well past the casual “it sounds good to me”. They will observe that we still need to tax Smith and Gonzales, from Houston, though they don’t have a lot of disposable income. Just the other day, they had to pass by that pair of shoes in Walmart, although the daughter goes to third grade in a badly worn pair. Holes in the bottom and all. But truly, her feet don’t get wet unless it rains. Those guys have to make many uncomfortable decisions about spending the balance of their income. Just isn’t enough money in the entire world to get rid of that word “scarce” that precedes “resources”.
Then there is the little issue about the reaction of the education “market” to all of that available cash. Universities will begin to spend more when they realize that the pipeline will deliver whatever they request, absent price controls. Certainly, it will not do to “flunk” underachievers. Pass everyone to keep the revenue stream flowing.
Then, of course, there remains the issue of the $14 trillion of debt and the projections of deficit spending as far as CBO can forsee.
Oh, and let’s not forget the “business” of the federal government. Every dollar that is taxed represents diminished liberty of Smith and Gonzales. We are, after all, enslaving their work, their output.
What about the issue of limitation of powers? Well, it has never stopped us before. And we have taken care to ensure friendly justices are appointed to SCOTUS. Not exactly the packing of the court proposed by FDR, but sufficient to negate the limitation of powers issue.
Is that all that is required to sway the American people to accept social collectivism piece-by-piece? Soon we have the whole package, price controls, mandatory wages, cradle-to-grave socialism without the unpleasant effects of violent overthrow of liberty & justice.
ChrisVJ #69:
Not sure what your point was, if you had one, other than, as it said on the statue at Farber College: “Learning is Good.”
And it’s nice that their vision and hand-eye coordination rescued at least 3 of your sons from their choice of education by enabling them to become pilots. As for me, my vision was not good enough and I had to study engineering to be of use to the USAF and then learn to fly entirely on my own time and with my own money.
And I have learned all kinds of other things as well, such as about airplanes and radio communications, all on my own time and with my own money. I have twice gone 1000 miles each way to the Smithsonian and studied their archives for information on aircraft-related topics, as well as studied many specialist books and interviewed people. I have written 3 magazine articles on aviation subjects, for which I received to date the whopping total of $600 (two mags paid me $300 each and Air Classics stiffed me). But I did it because I was interested in it and did not expect anyone to pay me for it.
Just because I was interested in airplanes and aviation history I did not expect anyone to pay me to pursue that interest, and pay me well to do it professionally, and that was a good thing, because it would have been a financial disaster.
The point is that people are studying useless or nearly useless things and expecting to be paid well for that useless knowledge. An important part of life is learning for fun and if someone wants to study Sanscrit or the origins of rap music, then more power to them. But it’s not a legitimate problem for the taxpayers.
#75 of RWE:
Agree totally with your:
…..”The point is that people are studying useless or nearly useless things and expecting to be paid well for that useless knowledge. An important part of life is learning for fun and if someone wants to study Sanscrit or the origins of rap music, then more power to them. But it’s not a legitimate problem for the taxpayers.”
This idea of a “right” to taxpayer assisted “College” for everyone is rank nonsense. What will those melon-heads do when they get there? How many High School “graduates” of today are fit to earn a decent living? Look at all of the “remedial” classes in English and Math required by “colleges” eager for paid enrollment over quality of students’ potential?
Businesses need practically applied studies….or, say businesses need studies which have a “go to work today here” aim/result….trades need start-right-in abilities honed in Trade Schools. Not all urgently needed productive knowledge comes from books.
It used to be said that a Liberal Arts background taught one how to live and appreciate life; to actually earn a living other courses of study are obviously required; perhaps taxpayer assistance can be provided for the truly gifted who’d otherwise be wasted….most certainly not as a broad “entitlement”.
Today’s young have grown up in a gradually increasing atmosphere of “We’re entitled” to do completely as they please.
Ol’ Karl Marx [ ...anybody here remember or even know that name?] had one thing right: “….from each according to his abilities”.
If today’s parents of today’s young have a pragmatic gene left (no pun intended) they will review the implosion, or internal collapse, of the Soviet Union in 1989. There’s this “Entitlement” attitude carried to it’s logical conclusion.
‘..my son made a mistake by being taken in by predatory lenders..’ – I’m tired of people, GROWN MEN at that blaming everyone else for theirs or their family’s stupidity.
Why their child didn’t go to a CC, JC or join ROTC in high school, military reserves, perhaps active duty or infinite-like other areas to seek assistance with their education is a freakin’ joke.
NO employer cares where one attended when receiving their Associate’s.
Secondly, college loans interest rates are so low it’s preposterous this couple’s son shrugged it off or he’d made the bare minimum payments.
And yet this 35 year old (?) and his parents are blaming other’s for THEIR idiocy?
Go sell stupid somewhere else, Mr. Ingham. There are HUNDREDS of other routes you and your son could have taken..
Mr. Rubin I’m curious as to what area or areas (I had a minor when completing school, just in case I didn’t like or couldn’t find employment straight away) Mr. Ingham’s son ( Who disclosed his son’s medical condition for what reason exactly?) had received his degree(s) in.
We have to be careful using 1940 and 41 as base years for those qualified to go to college. My own parents dropped out of school to get jobs to contribute to the family income. And, of course, WWII changed the job market and perspectives of young people. It was a very different world in those days.
“college education,” for the most part, is neither a right or a privilege- it is a ruse to create indebtedness which will lead to “enslavement” to the state all while preaching the gospel of the secular and zombifying vast hordes of maladjusted and uninformed nincompoops
This seems like very curious reasoning:
“In my opinion it is unethical for the University of California at Davis to be offering junk degrees like “Feminist Studies”. It is a misallocation of limited resources. If a student lacks the maturity or ability to pursue a valid degree then they should be designated as “academically disqualified” and expelled. The slot they take up at the university could then be made available for a competent student. Luring unqualified students towards junk degrees is another form of theft. The student’s time is stolen along with the parent’s money that was wasted on tuition.”
Misallocation of limited resources? Which resources do you have in mind? If you’re talking about the money, then you’re thinking like a socialist. People should be able to spend their money on whatever they want, however useless it may appear to you or me. If you’re talking about the professors at the school, they’re not limited at all–there’s an endless supply of them coming out of these same institutions. What do you think the Feminist Studies professor has a degree in?!
As to the charge of “theft,” that’s absurd. That’s worse than what the foolish parent quoted in the post says–at least they admit their son made a “mistake” even if they do cover that with the fashionable term “predatory lenders.” Saying that the student’s time and the parent’s money have been “stolen” is ridiculous. Your niece made what you consider to be a poor decision. It’s understandable that you find this painful. But her time and her parent’s money were given freely in exchange for a value they perceived.
To imply that they didn’t know any better and say this is equivalent to theft is a very dangerous position. That attitude plays directly into the hands of control freaks like President Obama, who are happy to take responsibility for all of this complexity and mandate how things should be so that your neice and her parents can be relieved from having to make such tough decisions.
Your paragraph above reflects that same mentality. You are saying that the free market isn’t good enough, the university shouldn’t be allowed to sell something you think is a poor value. This seems quite incorrect.
I think it’s very important not to fall prey to the desire for more control when things seem frightening.
If I seem touchy about this it’s because President Obama’s method of operation seems to be to ratchet up the fear while telling us that only more control will save us.
There is no question about the type of control President Obama favors. He is on record saying that the US Constitution is all wrong because it only provides “negative rights” not “positive rights.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkpdNtTgQNM
excerpt from transcript:
“But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasnt that radical. It didnt break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states cant do to you. Says what the Federal government cant do to you, but doesnt say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasnt shifted…”
He is trying his best to shift it. Let’s not help him.
I read an article the other day about a university in ND where the oil industry is booming. They started handing out fake degrees to Chinese students because they were having trouble attracting students due to the high paying oil jobs. It got me thinking, the elites don’t want the economy to boom, if people could get high paying jobs out of high school, then how could they herd the sheep over the edge of the student loan debt cliff anymore. The only way to line the pockets of college administrators, tenured faculty, and their government cronies is to make sure the sheep don’t get out of line. College has to be the only “hope” for the future or the whole scheme crumbles.
#16 JMS
Bravo, sir.
Who said life was fair? …might as well prepare for it.
I’ve always considered sports, hunting, fishing and other “extra curricular activities’ as a microcosm of life and allow youth to ‘practice’ at life without dire consequences.
Tweeting, Face Booking and surfing the web do not qualify.
And it doesn’t help when the ‘adults’ make everyone a loser by making everyone a winner.
Let us not forget that this “right” is to a Club Med-style college education with many spa amenities. I doubt they’d support the creation of small monastic-like facilities where students separated themselves for a few years to devote their time to the pursuit of knowledge and development of the capabilities for a life of the mind.
I work at a university. After chatting with a student for 15 minutes, I can pretty much tell who will be a high-earner, high-achiever and who will be a secretary with a degree. Simply having a college degree will not make you a success. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both college dropouts. You have to have vision, ideas, drive and ambition. If you don’t have that by the time you’re 18, a degree and student loan debt will not change your fate. I can also attest to that personally. My family subscribed to the “Poor Dad” part of the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” scenario: find what appears to be a secure job and fight hard to stay in it for life, incrementing your salary with cost of living increases. That’s why I’m a paper-pusher with a Masters degree, not living the American dream but enduring the bureaucratic nightmare.
What college education? College education has become the summer camp for late adolescent 19-23 year old kids. Grades 13 to 16, if you will. It is not a right, but it is a great way to get someone else to babysit our overgrown children. We should change the voting age to 25, when young adults finally have a mostly developed frontal lobe. By the way grades K-12 are not a right either.
When I was getting my Engineering degree the refrain was maybe Engineering wasn’t an education at all. More like a mere trade school. To my mind already war[ed by too many star trek episodes engineering was the highest calling a person could have. It was geeks vs barbarism.
I still think that. I still the country needs its educated geeks as much as it needs its hated millionaires, if not more so. We are the reviled squires that hand soldiers their high tech lances.
Just ask all the dead terrorists in hell, the country with the most geeks wins.
Most parents have succumbed to yet another religion. They believe that their children cannot succeed unless they get a college degree. In the past, people have succumbed to an endless variety of stupid religions. It matters not if the religions involve god(s). For example, Nazism, Communism, the Inquisition, Keynsianism, Kitchism (excessive fondness for kitchy things), Hare Krishna, etc. are all stupid but common religious-type beliefs. The believers in these stupid things usually insist that they are normal. In fact, they are. Humankind will fall due to our general propensity to accept nihilistic religions . Humanity will follow the ultimate fate of every individual human. It is a package deal.
BTW: I want everyone to ignore these words and to live a full, productive, and happy life.
MicaelC :
You beat me to the Griggs vs. Duke Power. The basic ban on companies employing IQ and aptitude tests is also discriminatory against men in general. In the past it was rare, but not unheard of to run into a plant engineer who never went to college full time. A company tested him and assigned him to a senior engineer on the job. He learned by doing and studying on the side.
Women do better in a studied structured environment. Men are more likely, at 18 or 19 to be sick of the classroom (12 years was enough) and may want to go out into the world.. at least a few years before thinking about college. Requiring a college degree for jobs that anyone with a high school education should be able to do, robs those men of that opportunity.
@80 – The real point is that it isn’t a free market exercise. The free market would never, NEVER, loan a child, and 18 yr. olds these days are children, the several tens of thousands of dollars that a worthless “Studies” degree charges. The free market would never let children take on the obligations on their own and with no security for the loan. The free market would never set the price so high on a degree with little or no earning potential. Yes, doing something stupid was an exercise in a freely made choice, but the market signals that should inform such a choice are very distorted by government interference.
@88 – Ironically, many governments offer some respite from the needless credentialling. The same anti-discrimination laws that caused so much over-credentialing also cause many large, deep pocket employers to allow experience substitution to meet minimum qualifications for most jobs outside the true professions to avoid discrimination claims based on imposing artificial barriers. Some limit experience substitution to experience obtained with that or a similar employer, but once one’s foot is in the door, one can climb quite far up the ladder before running into a credential barrier. You just have to be willing to put your pride in your pocket and start at the very bottom, something a lot of young people aren’t willing to do anymore.
We are now seeing young men drop out of high school or not pursue college at a very high rate. I first began seeing young men with only a GED or HS diploma show up as applicants for entry level clerical and administrative positions in the early to mid ’90s, an area once the exclusive province of young women. If they could master the discipline of coming to work and doing as they were told, and enduring a hostile, female dominated work environment, before long a whole world of promotional opportunity was open to them. At least in my State’s government a general college degree will give you a five to ten year and $10-20K/yr. advantage depending on the field. A GED or HS Diploma will get you in at $25K or so a year at entry clerical/administrative jobs, a general BA/BS will get you in at $30-40K, but either way in most fields if you have a decent work ethic you can get to or near the top of the merit system service and make in the $80K or higher range, much higher if you get there early and stay awhile. My wife came to work for the State of Alaska in ’76 with a Mississippi HS Diploman right out of school and with no experience. They still gave typing and writing tests back then and she passed and was hired as an entry clerk typist, which probably paid $12-15K/yr. back then – remember these are Alaska wages and back then they were much higher than the Lower 48. Along the way she worked into the accounting field and took some college accounting classes, some paid for by the State some on her own but never took the full course load to a degree and a CPA. She became expert in the State’s financial management and accounting programs and retired in ’08 at the top of the merit system making $80K and change. Any higher would have been a political appointment, which she could have had in the Murkowski Administration but she had further to go to retirement than Frank had to go to re-election and getting fired on a change of administration would have delayed her retirement to 55 rather than just going on 30 years. Young men that were hired as clerks, including a couple I hired, are now Section Chiefs or other upper level supervisors and in a few years some of them will be managers poised to become directors of divisions when they’re in a place to accept the risk of a political appointment.
So, to avoid the discrimination claims many governments have given a “back door” and admittedly longer route, but it is there and it is actually a safer route because by the time you get to positions with real responsibility and authority, you’ve proven that you can do the work; lots of those degreed candidates that start higher don’t make the required one year probationary period because these days, you can definitely get a general college degree without doine or knowing much of anything, so long as somebody will loan you the money to keep going to college. I know what many or maybe most think of people who work for governments, but governments are at best a 90-10 proposition in which 10% of the people do 90% of the work. If you’re one of the 10%, you work and work hard, but absent getting crossthreaded with some political appointee, they want to keep the 10% around and will reward and promote them, because even in Democrat administrations, somebody has to work.
It’s a right to a degree she means, instead of a right to be able to earn one. (The latter one would mean too much work for the Occupy Wall Street crowd.)